A Very Good Sidewalk Story

Paul Konway lived on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. This is not one of the very pretty, viny streets of white washed brick and dusty trees. It is a canyon of low tenements and garages offering moving and storage. Paul, publicity director for a small corporation, spent most of the year writing its annual report. The rest of the time he pretended to be working on the annual report and wrote poetry in his drawer, slamming it shut and lighting a cigarette like a serious thinker when an officer of the company passed his desk.

In the evening Paul sometimes showed his poetry to his friends. They told him that it was wonderful. It was not wonderful. He sometimes thought that it was at least good, but in his heart of hearts he knew that it was not yet good, either. He was very good, however, even wonderful, at annual reports. Paul Konway was also lean, high-cheekboned, and fine in his movements, just like the architects named Paul in stories wherein the handsome, sad, young architect meets a girl named Candy or Cindy and he wants to build Beautiful Houses instead of parking garages and in the end Candy or Cindy turns out not only to love Paul but also to have a gruff but goodhearted father, probably named Zeckendorf, who needs a brilliant young architect for a Beautiful Homes housing project which he thinks of in the last paragraph.

But what am I saying? Paul was not even a little bit of an architect, and all the girls named Candy or Cindy were practical nurses or secretaries whose gruff, goodhearted fathers became gruff and badhearted when they heard that Paul wrote poetry.

"Will you marry me?" Paul once asked one of the girls named Candy or Cindy.

"Yes, dear Paul," she replied, "as soon as I finish my analysis. But probably then I will be too adjusted to marry a poet, so maybe you had better look elsewhere."

And off he headed into the night of Christopher Street, with the gloomy face of unsatisfied desire, looking elsewhere. Elsewhere turned out to be Kate Barker, who did not even live in Greenwich Village. You took the IRT subway uptown to 59th Street at Columbus Circle (local stop), walked a few blocks east and a few blocks south, and there you could find Kate – sleek, vibrant and stimulating, a dark, condensed love goddess, more compact, muscled, and stately than love goddesses usually are in the movies, but breathing very deeply like a goddess of love, in her apartment above a delicatessen on Seventh Avenue. Part of the reason she breathed so deeply is that she had to walk four floors above the delly in order to enter the place she called her house away from home. Also she breathed excellently, yearningly, because she was an actress looking for work, a model in the garment district only until the right part came along.

Here on Seventh Avenue, amid the smells of pastrami and automobile exhaust, with neon flickering through her windows and the roar and rush of mid-town Manhattan streaking by, she dreamed of carrying the burden of success back to Austin, Texas, which was her home at home. She played records by Brubeck and Monk in the meantime, and fought off the plump, lonely out-of-town buyers ("Why, just why not, honey?"), and tried a speech from a new script before her full-length mirror, on which hung negligee, panties and Paul Konway's tie. He had left it there the second time that he visited her, bringing her two peaches in a paper bag, then asking her to read the poem by William Blake:

I asked a thief to steal me a peach:

He turned up his eyes.

I asked a little lady to lie her down:

Holy and meek she cries.

As soon as I went an angel came:

He winked at the thief

And smiled at the dame,

And without one word spoke

Had a peach from the tree,

And 'twixt earnest and joke

Enjoyed the lady.

That poem is called The Angel, and it can be found with slightly more archaic spelling in several anthologies. How did Paul Konway persuade Kate Barker to read poetry by William Blake, John Donne ("Then be not coy, but use your time; and while ye may, go marry"–but no, that's Robert Herrick) and Paul Konway? Here's how. He went alone, consoling himself for Candy-or-Cindy's increasing adjustment to non-poets, to a flamenco recital at Carnegie Hall. He was gloomy (face of unsatisfied desire) and it was Saturday night.

The same day, it turned out, an out-of-town buyer had made a grotesquely clumsy pass at Kate while it was still light (late afternoon, September, day light saving time) and she had nervously and angrily fled him, eaten a nervous angry sandwich, bought a ticket, and climbed the balcony to hear some nervous, angry, clacking, driving flamenco music. Her ticket put her next to Paul Konway.

Ole! Ole!

In fact, ¡Ole! ¡Ole!

First the early, traditional details: intermission cigarette, have you a light, fumble for match, joke, smile – very nice guitar, don't you think? Coffee afterward. Then they went strolling along Central Park South in the bright dry midnight of a fine Manhattan autumn. Kate felt calmed by this courteous, very formal young man – calmed and challenged. She was happy because Paul was not short and paunchy like out-of-town buyers. She was delighted and challenged. Paul was pleased because Kate had a high-carrying proud walk, a soft, pleased, and laughing voice, and a respect for both annual reports and poetry (a woman's practicality, plus the Mary Hardin-Baylor College, Belton, Texas, rural environment, no men, much reading of This is My Beloved, by a young poet who is long since middle-aged). Paul was shocked by his good luck. And challenged.

They agreed that they had a great deal in common, some of it openly admitted, some secret. What they admitted was an interest in the theatre, poetry and music: "Diz blows the most," Kate said.

"Marcel Maas, the great French oboist, also blows the most," Paul gravely added.

She nodded and they held hands crossing the street. One thing they had in common which they did not admit aloud was the hollow, racketing loneliness of unattached young men and women in the great city. Their hands, which refused to unlock when they got across the street, made this admission. That was how Paul's tie came to be hanging on Kate's mirror. She invited him up, blushing, knowing he would understand that a girl from Mary Hardin-Baylor College (Belton, Texas) only meant to share some of her music with him. It was warm coming up the stairs and he asked permission to remove his tie. It was especially warm walking behind Kate as she showed him the way.

"By all means," she said. "Would you like some more coffee?"

"It keeps me awake."

"Me too," she said, so instead they had a glass of wine, which – as they noted – does not keep them awake but makes their cheeks pink. Both of them. They had another. Both the cheeks of both the new friends were made pink, but less by the wine than by the new friendship. The unusual importance of this sort of friendship can be indicated by studying a single aspect of it: they agreed ferociously, they quarreled tenderly about almost everything. For example, places to live in New York City. Paul loved the antique charm of Greenwich Village, its girls with ponytails and ballet slippers and Indian jewelry made in little Navaho workshops on Second Avenue, its gabled roofs and leaded windows and winding, seldom unwinding streets, its gabble of culture and its atrocious rents. He loved life, he loved off-Broadway theatre, he loved art: how else to survive one blasted annual report after another?

"Spaghetti," Kate said contemptuously, "it's all spaghetti."

She preferred the Real People, Real Life of midtown Manhattan – the girls from furnished rooms who dress as if for the Princess of Monaco's wedding, the unemployed photographers photographing the unemployed actors, the smart shops for the smart people who come from somewhere else, the whirling, roaring din of this center of the central city.

"Frantic," Paul commented, "it's all a rat race. Those people are so busy getting ahead they forget they're human beings. And usually they don't even get ahead."

"Oh you're wrong! Snob!" Kate cried. "The Village is for squares – campus Bohemians!"

"You're worse than a snob," Paul said. "You don't understand."

"I do!"

"Don't!"

"Do!"

"Don't!"

With that they embraced fiercely. When they had finished kissing, they looked balefully at each other. Something strange, necessary, but dangerous was happening to them. When they finished this suspicious survey of each other, of Kate separately, of Paul separately, of Kate and Paul together, they each sighed. Then they were sighing together. Then they were sweetly kissing.

• • •

The path of true love runs unsmoothly on the Fifth Avenue bus from Washington Square to 55th Street. Squealing of brakes and hissing of doors. It is quicker but noisier on the subway. It is delicious but expensive by taxi, except during rush hours, when it is expensive but not delicious and the driver yells unmentionable commentaries to pedestrians, drivers and other obstructions. Manhattan can be defined as a great obstruction upon which dogs are walked and taxis handicapped. This creates terrible dangers for human beings with their eyes lifted to the marvels of the towered gothic island.

And transportation does not constitute the great problem of modern love, either, or if it does, the issue is the transportation of one soul into communion with another. Men and women have learned to make trouble for each other. Perhaps they always knew how, but with advancing civilization they have become increasingly expert at jolting discontinuities, jostling (continued on page 88) Sidewalk (continued from page 60) maneuvers. Obviously trouble is out of place in the instance of Paul Konway and such a rounded, generous, heel-clacking and softly sliding creature as Kate Barker. But Kate carried a burden of ambition in her sleek little head: an actress she was.

"An actress I am," she murmured, turning to examine her frowning face in the mirror. She smiled at it. It smiled back, showing its teeth.

"A woman you are," said Paul, "and a man am I. Therefore – –"

The reason for this discussion of obvious basic matters is that these two nice people had come to what seemed the parting of their ways. That is, they were in love. Paul wanted to marry her; she even seemed, in certain moods, to want to marry him. Frequently this suffices to crush a beautiful friendship.

"You want me?" Kate said. "All right, go easy, you'll have me."

"I love you, Kate."

"Yes, but let's not hurry so. I have so many things to do first! How can I waste all my training, my talents, my – –?"

The misery on his face stopped her. She kissed him. He did not kiss back. She kissed him again. He kissed back.

"I love you too," she admitted mournfully. "Isn't it awful?"

"Why?" Paul demanded. "Why awful? Seems to me like it makes the world go around. For example, I'm writing the best annual report of my career at this very moment, figuratively speaking. Yesterday, I mean. And as to my poetry, why, you should see the stuff on top of the stuff in my top drawer. It's great. Not the stuff on the bottom, the stuff on top."

He knew that he had not been a good poet but that now he was doing good work. He felt the change.

"And I, I too," she answered, "I'm a better actress today. Feeling. Depth. Truth and Beauty."

"So?"

"So you know," she said with eyes downcast. "Awful."

Paul had brought Kate good luck, it seemed, and this good luck for her meant bad luck for them. She was offered a fine part in a touring road company of that crusty, easily digestible comedy, No Laughing Matter. It would mean being away from New York – including mid-town, Greenwich Village and Paul Konway – for perhaps a year. In a year, of course, almost anything can happen; but in a year without Kate, except for flying visits, Paul felt that nothing but brimming misery could happen. Gray loneliness is no fun at all, as anyone who has tried it knows. While he considered this prospect, a black and lowering jut of the jaw came over the sensitive face of Paul Konway, a touch of apeness in the countenance of the annual reporting poet.

He was thinking: Is it better to be the wife of an unknown poet but well-known nice guy, living in Greenwich Village, than to have a small part in a fairly good road company of a well-tested play?

He was answering his own question: Yes. She would be a dope to risk losing me.

And under the angry apeness crept a chagrined challenge: I'm a fool if I don't capture her.

"Let's go for a bus ride up Fifth Avenue," he said. "Let's walk on Riverside Drive uptown."

"OK," she said, "is that where you want to quarrel? Because, love, I see you have your heart set on a fight." She took his arm and hugged it to her. "Let's not and say we did, all right? Let's look at the river and the boats and the Palisades and the Spry factory. Let's be romantic instead."

Unmollified, he said sullenly, "Change your shoes. Don't wear high heels if we're going to walk."

"But I walk just as well in heels, you know I do!"

Etcetera. This discussion careened rattlingly on, the eternal triangle – man, girl and spike heels. Unfortunately it could be settled by compromise, one high heel and one sandal, so they came to a national, a political, a truly statesman like solution: Paul gave in. "On the unimportant things," Kate had always said, "you give in to me. On the important things I will give in to you. I think that's only right."

The trouble was that lovely Kate seemed to reserve the right to define what was important and what was not. And now, with a primary question, she entirely disregarded their cheerful solution to haggling. She stuck her small nose in the air and said: "I need to develop my career." Although she was developed in the other ways, intellectual, emotional, stacked, she had that bug crooning in her ear: You're an actress, Kate Barker, you are.

The worst of it was, as Paul had to agree, that the bug did not lie. She had talent. But this humming, buzzing bug could sting her away from him.

What to do? They strolled toward Fifth Avenue, Paul cursing Thespis and Dionysus and Sophocles and Shakespeare and Chekhov and Wilfred J. Wilfred, Jr., the distinguished author of No Laughing Matter. It did not help. Kate went smartly by his side. She hoped that Paul would come to Understand. (See "Surrender" in any determined woman's secret inner dictionary.) They sat silently in the bus, the dusk brimming up from the windy streets, down the pink, smoke-grazed, misty sky of Manhattan afternoons. They looked mournfully into each other's eyes with that age-old effort of lovers to read the future and find it perfect, permanent, although no human effort can be permanent. She sighed. He sighed.

They were in danger of speaking poetry, on the brink, teetering, when the bus leapt forward and a man in a black coat with a fur collar banged his fist against the door, shouting, "Wait! Stop! You, you, you – –" to the bus driver, who smiled triumphantly through thin lips as he churned through the traffic. The spell was modified. The world was still with them. Why the devil should that man wear a coat with a fur collar on such a fine autumn afternoon?

They got down from the bus. Paul, who was wearing sensible shoes, stumbled and nearly fell. Kate, who was wearing three-inch heels, caught his elbow. "Oh the breeze from the Hudson," she said. "Really nice."

They walked.

Hard, Paul decided. Firm. Make up your mind irrevocably. That was a hard word to think, so he pronounced it aloud for emphasis: "Irrevocably."

"That's the George Washington Bridge," said Kate. "Well-known architectural feat. International admiration. Very pretty."

Hard, firm, even angry, Paul thought. And so, standing there on the crisp autumn grass in early evening, looking out over the reflected black waters of the river, with all the island at their back and the future before them, hard, firm and angry, he moved to shake her (masterfully), and did; but the shake – that very mind-made-up shake – changed mid-air, midthought, to a mere caress. What other way is there to love?

The masterful way. Paul had difficulty getting to it.

Strongly heated, healthy, Kate leaned against him. She was his, she was all his, her hand and shoulder touched him, the long length of her body under the raincoat touched him, she was not his. She was an actress.

"By God you'll stay!" he shouted.

"Oh dear, oh dear," she said in tender dismay, moving away slightly. He regretted the vanished sweetness of their stroll by the park, but he was furious with plans for her. "Still thinking about that? But I'll see you frequently, Paul." The word freee-quently made a whistling shrill ring in his ears.

"Who's more important, me or No Laughing Matter?"

"You are, of course, silly, but that's my career. How'd you like it if I asked you to stop writing poetry? What is it you've been so busy writing lately, anyway?"

"There's no comparison. It doesn't interfere with us. In fact, it – it – it – –" And he recognized the silliness of it. "It makes me a better man for you."

"I know." She touched his cheek. She (continued on page 107) Sidewalk (continued from page 88) appreciated the seriousness which made him willing to risk looking foolish. "I know, and you're not one of those foolish little poets, either. You're my tall clever Paul. But don't you think being happy with my career, my talent – why not use the word? – makes me a better woman, too?"

"But it interferes."

"Not really. Not unless you look at it that way."

"How else can I look at it? You'll be in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston – –"

"Sh," she said, putting her finger on his mouth, "sh. Calm yourself, Mister Geographer."

"And I'll be writing my annual report and my verse and my other project all alone." He thought a moment. An ominous coolness fell over him. "Maybe alone," he said.

Well, so it goes, so it went. They disagreed away the evening, most untenderly, the way fierce lovers sometimes must. This devouring part of love makes it hard for everyone. It might be assumed, however, from what very often happens in such cases, that this is also the habit of true lovers. One would think that, since Kate loved Paul and Paul loved Kate, and in this romance the only serious triangulation was provided by Career in Road Company, it would be easy to solve the problem. Is it not better, as Paul argued, to be the wife of a steady poet than to have a secondary part in a fairly mediocre success?

Impossible to decide without the quarrel.

The quarrel taught Kate something about what she could lose, to wit, Paul. She remembered all at once her awful echoing midtown loneliness without him. He was striding silently by her side, not talking, distant, measuring himself away from her. He might just as well have been with someone else. In fact, she understood that he was already imagining someone else while she flourished briefly in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, etcetera.

So the quarrel taught her about loss and Paul at her side reminded her of gain.

She saw him looking intently at the chalk scrawl on the sidewalk and she wondered, What's he brooding on – another girl? She touched his arm. "Please, Paul, what are you thinking about? Tell me."

"That phrase on the sidewalk – I saw the same thing downtown. It's beautiful, Kate, it's great poetry. Maybe he walks all over New York writing it."

She looked.

Leroy Love Carmen

"But you seem so abstracted," Kate said, "so distant. What are you thinking about – Carmen?"

"And Leroy, too. I have an idea for a play – oh, a little comedy, something sweet and touching and off-Broadway that could be done at the Timely Playhouse. They suggested I try a play for them. There would be a part for you – –"

"For me?"

He meant to show his teeth in pique at her ambitious hurry, but instead he turned his full smile on her. "I've been thinking about it ever since I met you."

"Make it a romantic comedy. I'll move down to the Village. Make it a romance, could you please, Paul?"

"It is." He touched her hair lightly. He waited. "It is already."

She knew that she was busy finding reasons to refuse the road company job. She knew that she was busy staying in New York. "What's the title?" she asked him.

"Leroy Love Carmen, of course."

She knew that she was very busy in his life, and he in hers, and forever, with no road companies to part Kate Barker from her very own staff playwright. She moved against him, resting her cheek and her sweet breath against his ear, murmuring her personal version of that very old, very good sidewalk story: "Kate love Paul."